Section archive - Mentoring & Supervision

This study compares between the views and attitudes of university staff, student teachers and class teachers from the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland. This project reveals a reservoir of goodwill between tutors, teachers and students, along with a willingness to engage in dialogue and collaboration.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the idiographic roles of mentors who supervise student teachers in distance-learning pre-service teacher education programs during practicum. The findings of the study revealed that the cooperating teachers identified the following tasks as their mentoring responsibilities: ‘Providing facilitative information to enhance classroom performance’, ‘Giving constructive feedback on teaching performance’, ‘Helping student teachers form a professional identity and become aware of their professional development’, ‘Providing moral support’, ‘Facilitating socialization of the student teacher’, ‘Scaffolding lesson planning’, ‘Willingly offering facilitative information’, ‘Helping students to use and understand observation forms’, ‘Preparing for the mentor role’ and ‘Interacting with other cooperating teachers’.

This paper advances beyond a definition toward a common framework for specifying mentoring models. Sixteen design elements were identified from the literature. These design elements were tested through specification of two different mentoring models from higher education contexts.

This article examined the properties of a new induction measure (Langdon Induction and Mentoring Survey [LIMS]) using quantitative and qualitative approaches. The sample included 273 participants: beginning teachers, school-appointed mentor teachers, classroom teachers, and school leaders from public schools in New Zealand. The authors argue that the LIMS serves to address the significant gap between the need and the availability of viable measures of induction and mentoring programmes for beginning teachers. The LIMS was found to be psychometrically sound for this sample. In addition, this analysis indicated that significant differences were found in perceptions of programme quality between the school leaders and teaching staff, with school leaders demonstrating the highest positive responses and the classroom teachers the lowest positive responses.